Conversations with corporate researchers

Araceli Hintermeister  

Research Assistant, Consumer Insights, America’s Test Kitchen

How does your background in librarianship and information services impact your role as a researcher? 

Much of my background and training is to help others find the answers to their questions which allows me to better understand a client’s research needs and identify a path to get there. Library and information sciences is quite a diverse field that focuses on not only research but facilitating research by providing diverse resources to fit everyone’s unique information-seeking behaviors. The coursework reflects just that with classes on user experience research, data management, reference services and evaluation.

What is the most challenging part of using MR to ensure America’s Test Kitchen recipes are foolproof outside the test kitchen?       

Potatoes and chicken always make the favorite ingredient list when we conduct research but if we based our recipe development on that alone we wouldn’t be serving our diverse customer base, all with unique taste buds. Rather, we use market research to help us make educated business decisions, even if there are sometimes risks. For example, we learned that while approximately 0.5 percent of the U.S. population is vegan, home cooks were still open to integrating vegan meals into their recipe repertoire and that led to our award-winning cookbook, Vegan for Everybody. Instead of creating a book about a vegan lifestyle, we created a book about integrating plant-based recipes into your life. 

Do you have any tips for researchers looking to launch their first shopper survey?       

Research your product carefully and at the same time get rid of what you know and be open to new information. At ATK, we know a lot about food and care about the tiniest details in food, but we continue to learn and be surprised by how food is experienced and presented to our customers across the nation. When creating our shopper surveys, we build our questions to reflect what we know and are open to new information. For example, we may ask respondents to select from a list of common weight sizes which we believe chicken breasts are sold in, but we build a space for customers to tell us if chicken is not presented to them in this manner or perhaps inform us that it is not the most economical or convenient form for them to purchase chicken breast. What we learn can have a serious effect on our product and recipe development. We most recently learned from our customers that eight-quart multicookers were the staple in their homes and that led us to reframe our research and recipe development to fit that size.

* Photo credit: EKF Studios